Slamming together Vital Speeches of the Day this morning, I wasn’t sure whether I had or hadn’t inserted a George Allen speech into the final document, so I searched for “Allen.” Allen was there—but what the search also turned up in the month’s dozen speeches, 42 uses of the term chALLENges.
The entire document is 40,000 words, so I did the math and found that “challenges” makes up almost one percent of the words in these speeches.
A wicked smirk pulling on my cheek, I did a similar search for “opportunities.” Nineteen. So about 1.5% of the words in the best speeches in the world are either “challenge” or “opportunity.”
As for why so many challenges and relatively fewer opportunties? Hey, these are tough times indeed.
But I wonder if I didn’t just stumble into a new measure of overall well-being. Mulling over a monthly Vital Speeches Leadership Confidence Index ….
Today the Dow Jones was is up 100 points on higher-than-expected Leadership Confidence Index figures. Vital Speeches of the Day reports that this month in speeches delivered by public- and private-sector leaders, “challenges” outpaced “opportunities” by only 15 percent, the lowest number since Vital Speeches started keeping records, in 2010 ….
Long story short: A 1992 speech by former Australian prime minister Paul Keating is being included in Australia’s National Archives’ “Sound of Australia” list.
But Don Watson, who wrote the Redfern Park speech—about reconciliation with Australia’s indigenous people—sez the speech itself wasn’t a work of genius. “This was something I had written basically overnight,” he said.
What made the speech matter was Keating’s willingess to give the speech. “There was only one politician who had the courage and conviction to deliver it and that was Paul.”
With the speech’s authorship long established, that seems to me to be just about the right thing for the speechwriter to say.
But Keating was not amused, finding “condescension” in Watson’s remarks and claiming that “The sentiments of the speech, that is, the core of its authority and authorship, were mine.”
And besides, Keating added, Watson shouldn’t be going around blabbing. Doing so violates what he called “the contract of participating in the endeavor and the power in return for anonymity.”
Arguing about who wrote what line in a classic speech, two decades on?
Speechwriter Obama understands the zeitgeist while President Obama seems a prisoner to it. Speechwriter Obama slyly dropped praise of American atheists into a speech about race and religion. President Obama was forced to react to the “ground zero mosque” controversy, and stumbled. Speechwriter Obama promised that his presidency would be the time when the planet would be healed. President Obama signed on to more offshore drilling shortly before the Gulf oil spill and has stood mute while Russia burns and Pakistan drowns.
Speechwriter Obama was a deep reader of Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre as a student. President Obama barely has time to floss and watch Sportscenter. And it shows.
Speechwriters, is there anything to Conley’s characterization of Obama’s inner speechwriter as his better half? Weigh in here ….
Bet you didn’t even know you’d missed the second one.
Yep.
According to the New Zealand-based Mitchell, there was the “era of the orator,” whose “heyday” she identifies as “From ancient times to the 1990s.” (This several-thousand-year era she characterizes as one where the speaker, hopelessly self-involved, pays attention to one’s “words … vocal variety … and body language.”)
The era of the orator gave way to “the era of the slide” during the 1990s, which is being overtaken—slide era, we hardly knew ye!—by “the era of the audience,” faceless no longer and demanding “a more participatory role in presentations, just as they do as citizens and consumers.”
Never again will audiences sit still “passively listening to a monologue”; they’ve been empowered by “the development of participatory democracy, consumer activism, mass content creation, the backchannel and the advent of Generation Y.”
And Mitchell’s prediction of how speeches will change to adapt to this fundamental change in human nature, and thus human communication?
Speeches will be shorter.
“Guy Vaynerchuck spoke for 10 minutes in front of an audience of 1,000s at SXSW 2010 and then opened up his keynote presentation to questions.”
I bet 1,000s of people were disappointed. They didn’t come to a conference to watch the keynote speaker field questions from a dozen randomly selected showboaters in the crowd. Sounds to me like Vaynerchuck didn’t have much to say.
One of the beautiful things about oral communication is that it resists technological intervention. Mitchell’s “slide era,” while it’s an occasional improvement to speechmaking, is also a frequent detriment. That’s because the nature and social purpose of this game is and always will be the same:
One member of society screwing up the courage to stand naked before other members of the society and share what he or she believes is true. The act is significant for the same reason it always has been because the audience has the speaker outnumbered and can accept or reject the speech before, during or after its delivery.
The era of the audience is as old as the era of the orator, because there ain’t never been, ain’t never going to be, one without the other.
A time-wasting video for most of the 3.5 million viewers, but required viewing for specialists in oral communication (that’s us). An actress introduces herself in 21 accents; what’s interesting and instructive to people charged with capturing the voices of others, are the choices she makes in varying not only how she sounds, but the words she uses as well.
Last week we at Vital Speeches celebrated the 75th anniversary of the ad agency Leo Burnett by sharing this speech by the founder.
To our rhetoric-centric way of thinking, it was a doozy.
But a correspondent—a veteran corporate logistics exec—wrote to say, “Listening to this guy is painful. Of course the employees of advertising agencies need to focus their attention on improving the quality of their output. Better ads translate into more product sold which in turn translates into higher ad revenue and greater profits for the agency. Leo Burnett did not need to lecture his employees about this truth. They understood it perfectly so his musings came off then as they do now as condescending drivel.”
He went on:
“The real objective of managerial lectures like this one emphasizing doing the job well for the sake of the craft itself, integrity, or your own professionalism is to divert employee attention away from all the money that is going into Leo’s pocket.”
I replied that the man had a point: The speech comes across as condescending. Nevertheless, it has proven to be a touchpoint for the company for many years.
And then I drew on some personal experience to address the more important issue.
As for Leo’s motives, I can’t speak for them, but I do know something about the culture of advertising agencies back then. My dad was creative director at Campbell-Ewald in the 1960s and head of his own agency in the 1970s.
Back then, foolishly or naively perhaps, there was a kind of idealism among ad-agency creatives: They talked earnestly and deeply about their craft (my dad gave speeches called “the man inside the man,” and “the importance of being interesting”).
And as I wrote in a tribute to my late father in Ad Age a couple years ago, his generation of admen believed that if they wrote more honest, human ads, the world would actually become a better place for it.
Of course, the same guys also believed—really believed—that what was good for GM was good for America.
In any case, I’m pretty sure Leo Burnett wasn’t needing to divert employee attention away from the money he’d made.
It’s so hard to imagine the era when people who worked for ad agencies and clients really believed in what they were doing.
But, to an extent far greater than anything we see today, they did.
Calling all Vital Speeches veterans: Has the leadership communication context, or has it not, changed in the way I described over the last 40 years? Has it become disingenuous to talk about intrinsic love of work? Or, as my correspondent claims, was it always thus?
Leafing through the Sunday Trinidad Express—you don’t get it delivered?—I came across a pretty funny piece on “How not to write a speech.”
It’s a savage critique of a “vast, baggy speech” given by the Trinidad & Tobago Minister of People. Columnist Judy Raymond writes, in part:
Dr Glenn Ramadharsingh … wasn’t trying to uncover facts; he may even have been attempting to do the opposite, though it was impossible to tell.
Dr Ramadharsingh cited studies that revealed the unsurprising fact that old people worried about their health and finances. …
Sometimes he remembered his actual topic, but that didn’t necessarily help. …
The sad thing was that huge amounts of work had gone into this speech.
There was a laboured, tired metaphor about the ship of state going off course (”askewed,” as Dr Ramadharsingh put it) that went on for paragraphs. … (Note to Dr Ramadharsingh: you don’t pronounce the “w” in “sword,” and “obsequious” has an “e” in the middle.)
As if that weren’t enough, the wordy minister quoted Wendell Mottley, Alice in Wonderland, Oscar Wilde—the last writer an MP should quote; Parliament is no place for irony. He massacred an irrelevant quotation from Charlotte Bronte (the “blendness” and “spurrence” of youth?). He dragged in someone called Alphonse Karr, who turned out to have written, “The more things change, the more they are the same” (which Dr Ramadharsingh rashly attempted in French).
Until he can hire a competent speechwriter, there are a few useful rules that Dr Ramadharsingh can salvage from Friday’s wreckage.
If you must use big words—in fact, any words—make sure you know how to pronounce them (”Damocles” comes to mind). If you have to look up suitable quotations to put into your speech: don’t. And you can save yourself a lot of work by remembering that … brevity is the soul of wit.
Speechwriters, what was the worst speech you ever heard or read?
I’d like to hear it, read it or just hear about it.
Vital Speeches of the Day podcast: COMMENTARY—Bill Lane to appear at “Leadership Communication Days”
August 30, 2010By David Murray
Bill Lane to appear at “Leadership Communication Days”
Just good are your best practices? Run them by the longtime speechwriter to G.E. CEO Jack Welch. (2 min.)
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Tags: Bill Lane, commentary, G.E., Jack Welch, Leadership Communication Days
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